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Thunderbird 6.0 arrives in Beta Channel

Mozilla has announced the release of version 6.0 of Thunderbird – its open source news and email client – into the Beta Channel. While a final release date for Thunderbird 6.0 has yet to be confirmed, a production version will likely follow shortly after Firefox 6.0, which is scheduled for 16 August.

Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, the first beta of Thunderbird 6.0 is based on the same Gecko browser engine as Firefox 6. It offers support for Windows 7 Jump Lists, which allow users to right click on the program button in the task bar for quick access to common features. On Linux, the default mail client check now works with newer distributions.

Thunderbird 6.0 Beta 1 on Mac OS X
Other changes include user interface updates and fixes for a number of bugs found in the previous version. Several fixes are also included for importing email from Microsoft Outlook.

More details about the Beta Channel version of Thunderbird, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes. Users can download the beta of Thunderbird 6.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's web site. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find.